Shan He’s friend threw out his mattress and bought a new one. That didn’t solve his problem. A few weeks later, the bedbugs in his Boston bedroom continued to torment him. Eventually, he paid to have a team of cleaners scrub everything, which finally did the trick.

Through his work as a graduate student at Stony Brook, He has helped develop an eco-friendly solution that allows him to use high technology against bedbugs by mimicking one of the world’s most formidable insectivores: the spider.

He has helped develop a nontoxic trap. Creating fibers that are 1/50th the width of a human hair, he fabricated a lattice of threads that stick to the legs of an unsuspecting bedbug. When the bedbugs move, they become stuck to more of the miniature strands, trapping them even further. Immobilized, they can’t get to a food source: namely, blood.

Without food, the bedbugs die in the traps.

“We were approached by FiberTrap,” explained lead researcher Miriam Rafailovich, the co-director of the Program of Chemical and Molecular Engineering at Stony Brook. “They were very much into green solutions for pests. They had some idea about trapping them without chemicals. We realized the best way to do it is to use nanotechnology.”

Rafailovich said the traps could be put behind baseboards or around the legs of furniture.

“It’s like quicksand,” Rafailovich said. “As they soon as they come into the entrance, they can’t turn around. As soon as they hit the fiber, they’re trapped.”

The traps, which are still in development, don’t require any food or bait.

In keeping with the eco-friendly approach to eradicating an infestation of bedbugs, the Stony Brook team is working on making the traps biodegradable, so that users can throw them in landfills or even compost them, Rafailovich said.

“If you put this in a landfill, there isn’t any poison,” Rafailovich said. “You haven’t used any chemicals to kill them. It’s perfectly safe for birds and other scavenging animals to eat them.”

Rafailovich said a team of scientists worked on this project, including He, Ying Liu, a scientist with Stony Brook’s Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center and graduate student Linxi Zhang. The nanotechnology solution was developed at Stony Brook’s Center for Advanced Technology in Sensor Materials, which is funded by NYSTAR as a part of a statewide effort to encourage greater technological and economic collaboration between industry and research centers.

He’s expertise is in electrospinning of the nanofiber. He prepared a solution of a polymer — a man-made substance suspended in a liquid. Then, He put the liquid in a syringe and applied a high voltage to the solution between the syringe and a substrate, which is the surface where he wanted to create the trap.

A graduate student who is originally from Beijing, He described watching the bedbugs become immobilized in the fibers.

“The second the bedbugs got trapped, I was so excited,” he said. “The nanofeature from the bedbug matches the nanofeature from the fiber.”

He, who uses the English name Harry, lives in Stony Brook and has been on Long Island for close to three years. He used to work as an English teacher in China. He also host

-ed a TV show called Outlook English.

Stony Brook’s reputation had reached China because Chen Ning Yang, originally a Chinese citizen, had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1957. Yang joined Stony Brook in 1966 and became the first director of its Institute for Theoretical Physics, which is now known as the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Yang is “very famous in China, which is how I heard of this school,” He said.

A classic guitar player, He has played Spanish guitar for more than 10 years.

He said his work on the bedbug project is particularly rewarding because of the practical component.

“I’ve been working on a lot of projects before, but all these projects are theory-based,” he said. “This is a really useful application. I think it can totally improve people’s lives.”

Rafailovich said this is just the beginning of the work Stony Brook might do to trap insects in an ecologically safe way. These traps might also be used for termites.

“We’re trying to improve it, to make it smaller,” Rafailovich said.

Growing up in Catania, Sicily, Gianluigi De Geronimo caught the bug from his engineer grandfather Giuseppe Nicotra, who was a structural engineer, and his uncle, Luigi Nicotra, who is a doctor with a passion for mechanics and electronics.

Determined to study engineering, De Geronimo took the first of what would become several steps away from the home he knew to pursue his growing passion, traveling to Milan Polytechnic to earn a master’s degree and then a Ph.D. He worked in radiation detection with Emilio Gatti, who came to Brookhaven National Laboratory for one month each year. Gatti recommended De Geronimo to BNL and, after an interview in 1997, the Sicilian engineer moved with his wife Marcella to Long Island, where they have lived ever since.

The moves have proven productive for De Geronimo, who, in April, was named the “Inventor of the Year” at BNL by Battelle, the Ohio-based company that manages BNL in partnership with Stony Brook University.

“I strongly believe that my achievements have been possible not only for my hard work but also for the environment I was blessed with, which includes my BNL colleagues and my family,” he said.

At BNL, De Geronimo designs application-specific integrated circuits for scientific research and tools for national security and medical imaging. He leads the ASIC development team. Some of the ASICs that De Geronimo and his group of five electrical engineers have designed have enabled products like the ProxiScan camera, which can identify prostate cancer in its early stages, as well as the high-resolution, x-ray Maia detector, which can be used to map specific elements in materials and artwork and was used last year to validate the authenticity of Rembrandt’s painting, “Old Man with a Beard.”

The team’s ASIC designs also enabled equipment upgrades for the Atlas detector at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

Other researchers often approach De Geronimo, who is in the instrumentation group at BNL, to develop technology that will further their scientific efforts.

“Usually, scientists come to the instrumentation division and discuss the problem,” he said. “Together, we develop the detector, the sensor, the electronics and all the rest that they might need to do their science. We make our scientists competitive by developing instruments they need.”

In a description of De Geronimo’s work as part of the award ceremony, Battelle wrote that he has helped deploy “over a million transistors on an ASIC consisting of just a few square millimeters of silicon, to bring about transformational changes in radiation detector performance.”

“The challenge we have is to integrate all these functionalities into a small area with a very low power dissipation,” he explained. Each channel generates heat, which creates problems for the sensing process.

He needs to “integrate a large number of channels in a small area with low power,” he said.

De Geronimo said radiation sensors convert radiation into electric charge, which moves toward electrodes generating small currents. The detectors read those currents.

The detectors can operate at room temperature or in environments of minus 200 degrees Celsius. His team helped develop ASICs for the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment, which operates submerged in liquid argon at minus 190 degrees Celsius.

The instrumentation group is also developing instruments for security that can detect sources of dangerous radiation.

He called the BNL radiation detector effort “state of the art,” because of the combination of specialized scientists who have backgrounds in core technologies, including microelectronic engineering and detector science, necessary to create the detector.

De Geronimo teaches a graduate class in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stony Brook called Advanced Design of Low-Noise and Low-Power Analog Circuits.

The BNL scientist said he hopes this course “gives SBU students a [competitive] edge” because “there are very few places in the world” that offer similar courses.

He and his wife, Marcella, an assistant vice president at Krasnoff Quality Management Institute at North Shore-LIJ Health System, live in Syosset with their children Frederico, 13, Francesca, 12, and Giovanni, who will be nine soon.

De Geronimo said he has been especially impressed by the way people react in difficult situations.

“We couldn’t even give blood after 9/11 because the lines were so long,” he said. “People in the United States have a good heart.”

As for his work, De Geronimo said he feels “extremely happy at BNL. That fact that I am succeeding is due to the wonderful collaborations. It’s a very positive environment.”

Before they can look for undiscovered particles that may only exist for an incredibly small amount of time, they have to haul something 3,200 miles that is so sensitive that a slight movement can cause damage.

Starting in the middle of this month, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory are shipping an electromagnet that is 50 feet in diameter from its home in Upton to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. The weight of that electromagnet is about 35,000 pounds — or the equivalent of almost three adult African bull elephants.

The first step, which will occur on June 10 or 11, involves removing the side of a building and securing the ring on a red, octagonal pinwheel with spokes. The structure, which Emmert International built as it manages the major move, looks like an octagonal wagon wheel with long spokes.

Traveling at night, a truck carrying the electromagnet will receive a police escort as it travels at close to five miles per hour from Upton to a barge 10 miles due south of BNL at Smith Point Marina on Bellport Bay. That trip is expected to take one night.

“The trailer has eight pairs of axles, which are all hydraulically self-leveling, so that even if it hits a pothole with one, there are many other tires” to keep the ring balanced, said Chris Polly, a project manager for Fermilab.

The ring is expected to board the barge on June 16, when it will travel around the southern tip of Florida, up the Mississippi River to Illinois. The journey, including a two-night trek from the river to Fermilab, should take about six weeks.

The reason scientists are sending such a sensitive piece of equipment over such a great distance is to explore an area of nature that might expand the world of particle physics. Back in 2001, scientists at BNL found something incredibly small but potentially revolutionary, that they couldn’t explain.

High energy interactions, such as those at the Fermilab accelerator, produce muons, which, like an electron, have negative charge but are 200 times more massive. These muons exist for only 2.2 millionths of a second. However, more than a decade ago, scientists at BNL noticed that these muons gyrated as expected — up to a point.

“We look at how these muons revolve,” said William Morse, resident spokesman for muon g-2 at BNL.

The frequency of the spin axis around a magnetic field differed, albeit in a miniscule way, from what the theory predicted.

The so-called Lande g-factor should have been 2.0023318358. In the BNL experiment, however, that factor was 2.0023318416.

If the experiments found new particles, “It would be a revolution” in physics, said David Hertzog, who was a part of the original experiment in 2001 at BNL and is now a professor at the University of Washington and a spokesman for the muon g-2 effort. “The whole motivation is to figure out what is beyond the standard model.”

The findings could cause a “rewriting of our textbooks and understanding,” Hertzog added.

Scientists suspected they were on to something, but they didn’t have a precise enough measure to know for sure. By moving the electromagnet to Illinois, they are uniting one of the world’s largest superconducting magnets to the powerful accelerators that can provide a customized beam of neutrons.

Once the electromagnet arrives in Illinois, it will start generating data in 2016 and may start producing results as early as 2017 or 2018.

Morse, who was also involved with the landmark study in 2001, said those results have generated over 2,000 references in the scientific literature.

“In my previous experiments, I would have said that 20 or 30 was a lot. We do think this is kind of a unique measurement.”

Morse, who has worked at BNL since 1976, lives in East Patchogue with his wife Sara, a teacher at Bellport Methodist preschool. They have four children: Andrew, a banker; Kathleen, who works in sustainable living; David, a physics grad student; and Rachel, a respiratory therapist. Morse is a fan of the ocean, where he enjoys swimming, fishing and crabbing.

As for the benefit of the muon experiment, Morse said it will gather basic information about the world and can train a future generation of scholars, industry leaders, and researchers.

“After the last experiment at BNL [in 2001], there were quite a number of graduate students. Many of them are off doing interesting things,” Morse said. “One of them is working on developing chambers to scan cargo ships, others are at universities and some are at national labs.”

It’s a nuisance during the summer months, when the weather heats up and bathing suits and shorts come out. Never a distinguishing or welcome sign, it’s the dimpled skin condition known as cellulite.

Researchers at Stony Brook University, however, believe they have come up with a possible injection-based cure. Using the same enzymes they’ve applied with frozen shoulder and Dupuytren’s contracture, a deforming hand condition that limits finger mobility, Marie Badalamente and Alexander Dagum have had some success in treating 10 patients in a first-round study of their injections.

Later this year, they expect to enter the Food and Drug Administration’s so-called Phase 2A trials, where they will continue to test their drug, called Xiaflex. They plan to advertise for study subjects and will likely test their remedy against a placebo (using something harmless as an injection that isn’t known to have any effect on cellulite).

In their first trial, their results showed promise. On average, patients saw a 77 percent reduction in cellulite one day after the injection. After six months, those patients still saw a 76 percent reduction. Side effects included soreness, black-and-blue areas and mild edema.

“This is the first properly controlled clinical trial of an injectable treatment that has a good chance to be FDA-approved,” said Badalamente in an interview.

Cellulite affects about 90 percent of women and 10 percent of men. Women have “more of these thin-strand fibers” in their thighs and buttocks, so the fat “kind of pushes up and through, although like a honeycomb of fibers,” said Badalamente, who is a professor of orthopedics. The result is this classic dimpling appearance in those areas.

“Patients flock to cosmetic plastic surgeons’ offices in search of treatments that may help them,” she said. “It’s very troubling to a women’s sense of herself.”

In a press release, Dr. Dagum, who is the interim chairman of surgery at Stony Brook School of Medicine, added that the “methods to remove cellulite are many, but none yet have been supported in medical literature to be effective or potentially usable as a standard practice.”

Through her work with other problems, like Dupuytren’s contracture and frozen shoulder, Badalamente had used the enzyme mixture in Xiaflex. Badalamente and Edward Wang, an associate professor of Orthopedics, are collaborating on the frozen shoulder treatments.

“The common thread is the presence of a substance called collagen,” Badalamente said. “In Dupuytren’s contracture, there’s an abnormal deposition [of collagen] from the palm to the fingers. There’s a normal collagen capsule around the shoulder. In frozen shoulder, there’s an adhesion of collagen that builds up.”

The enzyme mixture lyses, or dissolves, the collagen in frozen shoulder, freeing the shoulder to return to its normal range of motion. For frozen shoulder, these Phase 2A trials have just been completed. The treatment reduces the need for extended physical therapy or arthroscopy (surgery). Phase 2B trials will begin this summer or fall.

“It was readily apparent to me that this injectable drug, which is a combination of two collagenase enzymes, clearly had other uses in a class of disorders,” she explained. “The light bulb on the top of the head moment was that I knew about the microanatomy of cellulite.”

Although the studies with Xiaflex on cellulite are still in the early stages, the use of the enzyme mixture to treat Dupuytren’s contracture has been effective over a longer period of time. If, for example, it recurs years later, patients can get another injection.

“That might be the same for cellulite,” Badalamente said.

The researchers cautioned that safety always comes first in any new treatment, even with a procedure that has won FDA approval for other uses.

For the Dupuytren’s contracture, the process took about 15 years.

“That one probably took too long,” Badalamente said. “Each indication, as it comes forward, should take much less time.”

Badalamente said she sees firsthand the problems that affect patients.

“In the case of the hand, if you can image this disease affecting both of your hands, [there’s] misery,” she said. “It’s not cancer and it’s not going to kill you, but it’s gong to interfere with your function. If you see that misery and you’re able to potentially think about a therapy that’s less invasive than surgery, there’s nothing better in the world than getting a ‘Thank you’ from the patients.”

The male ensemble of Wood, Evan Teich, Josh Rothberg, Ben Rosenbach, Matthew Michael Urinak, Dennis Setteducati and Paul Velutis along with the females Jamila Sabares-Klemm, Diana Rose Becker, Audra Rizzo, Erin Raquel Garcia and Kate Cherichello all meshed together like the breech of a 16-inch battleship’s gun — another tribute to DiPietropolo.

This season-topper was yet again another exhibition of what the Engeman can mount in its unquestionable adherence to the highest norms of professionalism.

“South Pacific” will run at the Engeman Theater, 250 Main St., Northport through July 14. Call 261-2900 or go to www.engemantheater.com for tickets.

It often looks like an outline of Mickey Mouse’s head, with a large circle and two overlapping or attached smaller circles. Drawn in a chemistry class, the larger circle is oxygen, while the two smaller ears are hydrogen.

In plants that produce their own food through photosynthesis, taking apart the three circles helps them make food, such as sugars. Scientists like Wei-Fu Chen at Brookhaven National Laboratory are imitating nature by breaking apart, or electrolyzing, water, releasing hydrogen that could serve as an alternative to fossil fuels.

“This process mimics how plants convert sunlight and nutrients into sugars,” said Chen.

As the lightest element, hydrogen has the highest gravimetric energy density of any known fuel, which means it produces the highest energy of all the elements.

Scientists can reduce the effort it takes to split water by using a catalyst. While platinum and palladium have fulfilled that role, they are expensive, which makes them less viable long-term options.

Chen suggested twin high school students Shilpa and Shweta Iyer from Comsewogue High School, who were working in his lab, go home and search their kitchen for ingredients that, using much more cost-efficient substances like metal carbide and metal nitride, might become a catalyst alternative. In the presence of molybdenum, soybeans, which are rich in proteins, worked. The 17-year-old Iyer twins recently placed fourth in the chemistry category of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for their efforts (see related story in the Port Times Record and online).

So far, in tests with soybeans, the catalyst has continued to be effective for over 500 hours. The production process, Chen said, is mature for industrial applications, with a projected cost that is “fairly economical” compared to other options. For commercial use, however, tests may need to take at least a year. Chen is searching for collaborators and would like to transfer the technology to an interested commercial partner.

Now that his lab has developed a process that works, Chen said that the next steps involve understanding the chemical mechanism that enables soybeans to act as a catalyst in the electrolysis of water.

“We don’t know why it’s so active,” he explained. “My job is to figure out the mechanism in the solution.”

Chen is able to tap into the considerable resources at BNL, including the National Synchrotron Light Source. By shooting beams of light through the reaction, Chen has found information about the catalytic active center and how the applied voltage changes its electronic state. He plans to study how changes in some of the conditions, such as the temperature or the pH (whether the solution is more of an acid or a base) affect the process.

The NSLS beams can allow scientists to monitor changes that occur in an incredibly short time scale, which makes it possible to track small changes in the reaction.

“By knowing the reaction mechanisms, scientists will be able to predict new effective structures for the water electrolysis and may find new principles in the reaction,” Chen suggested.

Chen explained that developing a hydrogen fuel-based economy remains a challenging task. While he is working hard to develop ways to make hydrogen fuel more available through water electrolysis, other scientists are researching the problem of storing and transporting hydrogen.

“The coming hydrogen age will be based on the completion of production, delivery, storage and utilization,” Chen said.

Chen said some hydrogen-driven cars are already available for purchase.

“There are already some prototype products out there, but the problem is that the cost is too high,” he said. There are fuel cell cars that use hydrogen in California.

Chen lives in Ridge with his wife Chiu-Hui Wang (who uses the American name Chloe). Wang works as an electron microscope specialist in the chemistry department at BNL and at Graphene Laboratories in Calverton.

A native of Kaohsiung City, the second largest city in Taiwan, Chen said he enjoys the natural life and the fresh air on Long Island. He also loves skiing, hiking and photography. He has a blogspot site where he has posted pictures of a fawn foraging in the snow and a negative photo of rainwater on a window. Photography inspired him in 2006, when he viewed a series of photographs of Taipei City in 1957 taken by a member of the U.S. Army, Tom Jones.

As for his work, Chen hopes hydrogen fuel becomes a viable, and affordable, alternative to fossil fuels.

“Considerable work needs to be done before a hydrogen-fueled vehicle becomes an option for us,” he said.

A computational systems biologist, Sergei Maslov recently showed what makes some pieces of computer code critically important to computer systems, the same way certain genes are common and important among bacteria.

“I was working with Linux, which has real similarities with bacteria,” said Maslov, who is a computational biology group leader at the Department of Biosciences at Brookhaven National Laboratory and an external faculty member at Stony Brook. Engineers can “reuse packages created by other engineers, who could be on another continent. It’s a complex interdependency.”

The most frequently used parts are also among the most functionally important ones. Scientists can measure their importance by looking at how many other components depend on them for their operation.

“I was rather shocked by how much is similar” when comparing bacterial genes and computer codes, he said. His results were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As a systems biologist, Maslov typically works with large amounts of data to make sense of patterns.

“The models I create explain the real world around us. I am very interested in complex networks,” he said. “The first challenge is to get data describing those networks.”

Fortunately, he said, the amount of publicly available data has grown enormously over the last two decades. Indeed, in his study, Maslov looked at over 2 million Linux computers and 500 bacterial species.

Maslov is one of four principal investigators in a large Department of Energy-sponsored project called KBase.

The project, which started a year and a half ago, includes researchers from a wide range of institutions. Maslov leads the group of scientists based at BNL, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Yale.

One of the goals of KBase is to provide a “solid platform that supports predictive biology in a framework that does not require users to learn separate systems to formulate and answer questions spanning a variety of topics in systems biology research,” according to the KBase website.

The application of that predictive research includes handling biological problems in energy and the environment.

In addition to his work with KBase, Maslov has looked at stock price fluctuations, Internet connectivity data, World Wide Web pages, hyperlinks and many others.

He is currently analyzing food webs by using data in KBase that describes microbial communities and uses network analysis tools to make sense of microbe-microbe and plant-microbe interactions.

“I view food webs as a network of interacting objects,” he said. “You can study all the individual microbes in a food web very well, but still not understand how they interact.”

He looks at the pattern of connections among species, to determine which species might be more important. Long-term, he said he wants to understand how certain perturbations — or changes — will cascade down food webs.

“We want to understand which perturbations lead to minor changes and which will lead to large-scale systemwide changes,” he said.

Maslov said the biggest lesson he’s learned from studying the patterns in evolution is that “if you want to design software or any other complex system, make it evolvable. Make sure it doesn’t become too rigid.”

Maslov has lived in many towns since he came to Long Island two decades ago, including in Stony Brook, Sound Beach, and Dix Hills. Indeed, when he resided in Dix Hills, he lived in saxophone great John Coltrane’s house, which is now being turned into a museum.

Maslov’s wife Olga Maslova, a costume designer, is working on sets and costumes for an opera in Boston. Maslova left for the first meeting with producers on the day of the marathon, but was on the Long Island ferry during the attack.

The couple lives in Shoreham with their 10-year-old son Leo and their 6-year-old Alexander.

Maslov grew up in Moscow and appreciates the proximity of Long Island to the City.

As for his research, “We allow the people who do experiments on organisms to recommend particular genes they should pay attention to, maybe provide some guidance on how best to optimize a plant to survive in drought or good soil conditions. We organize the data and allow researchers to work with it.

Using the three pounds of matter between his ears, Tony Zador came up with an idea. Instead of looking closely at all the individual neurons to understand the connections in the brain, he would take advantage of a cost-effective way to monitor those links.

A professor of biology and program chair of neuroscience at Cold Spring Harbor, Zador has created a bar-coding system in which he hopes to label each neuron. He also plans to monitor the connections among those neurons.

Scientists “know a lot about individual neurons, but far less about how they’re wired up,” Zador said. “Much of the scientific community believes that disorders like autism and schizophrenia arise from problems with wiring. My core interest is in understanding how we go from a wired-up brain to behavior.”

The way our brains work has become a new frontier in science, as President Obama announced a new brain initiative. The effort is designed to enhance our understanding of the mind, help combat diseases and disorders, and lead to new companies and jobs.

Zador’s bar-coding approach differs from that of many other researchers.

“Very smart people at great places — MIT, Harvard, Stanford — are all trying to develop the technology to put together a wiring diagram using electron microscope images. The problem is, even if they succeed, it’s incredibly expensive,” Zador said.

The cost of sequencing genes has gone down precipitously over the last decade. About 10 years ago, the cost for determining the order of base pairs for a person was about $1 billion. Today, that is now about $1,000 to $3,000, Zador estimated.

“If we could somehow convert the problem of figuring out the connectivity of the brain to a problem of sequencing DNA, then this problem, in principal, would be quick and cheap,” he said.

The way this works is by studying mice in which each neuron has a unique DNA label (created by his lab). He believes those labels will not affect the circuitry of the brain, although he plans to test that hypothesis. By looking at these circuits, he will be able to get an idea of how they connect.

The science is a “work in progress,” he said. He’s about to submit a proof of principle that shows how the process works.

If and when this system works and the researchers can determine the typical connections in the brain, they might start looking at the brains in a mouse model of autism.

“It’s quite plausible to believe we’ll get a much better understanding of what’s going on in the brain of someone with autism or schizophrenia if we can understand what happens in a mouse that has those genes disrupted in the way they are in humans,” he said.

Knowing what the normal circuit looks like is a starting point that opens up a wide range of questions.

At this point, one of the theories about autism is that some of the longer-range neuronal connections are impaired, while the local connections are more active.

If that turns out to be the case, scientists might be able to use different drugs to enhance one type of connection while quieting the effect of another.

While Zador came up with an idea he believes will work, his background in physiology and computational and theoretical science didn’t prepare him to develop the molecular biology techniques he’d need for his research. An avid runner who covers five or six miles each day — either outside the lab or on a treadmill — Zador used to run alone.

For the last five or six years, he’s run a few times a week with Josh Dubnau. A colleague at CSHL, Dubnau provides a “one hour tutorial” on molecular biology with each run — while discussing other scientific challenges and, on occasion, politics.

A resident of Laurel Hollow, which is within walking distance of the lab, Zador and his wife Kathy Shamoun, who practices Chinese medicine at Cold Spring Harbor and is also a childbirth educator, have two sons, 7-year-old Ronin and 3-year-old Bowie.

Zador recognizes his research is going in a different direction from other scientists.

“What are the chances it’s going to work?” he wonders. “I’m betting my career on it. I’m enthusiastic and optimistic.”

Correction:

In the article “BNL’s James Dickerson: facilitating nanotechnology” that ran last week, we incorrectly reported how long the Center for Functional Nanomaterials has been open. The building has been open for 5 years. We regret the error.

James “Jay” Dickerson isn’t sitting back and waiting for people to come to him. The assistant director at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Dickerson is actively looking to find ways for the technological powerhouse to collaborate with everyone from small-business owners with innovative ideas to scientists to multinational companies.

“We at CFN need to reach out to the industrial community in Long Island, New York state and the mid-Atlantic area,” he said. “We sometimes are guilty of saying ‘Hey, we’re here. Come and find us.’”

This problem is most evident, he said, with small businesses that may have brilliant ideas, but may not have the resources to use expensive equipment, the background, or the contacts to use nanotechnology characterization or equipment.

At CFN, he suggests they have waited for people from industry to come to them. He suggests a more efficient approach involves actively pursuing and engaging local companies through workshops to show them what is available.

A facility that’s about 10 years old, the CFN is housed in a two-story glass building on the BNL campus. The research ranges from electronic nanomaterials, including structures for photovoltaics and electrochemical energy storage systems, to soft and biological nanomaterials, theory and computation, electron microscopy and nanoscale catalysis and interface science.

“We are a Department of Energy facility,” Dickerson said. “That means our taxpayer dollars are paying for our facilities. My personal interest is not just helping out the scientific community, be it universities or national labs, but also helping out the commercial or industrial community.”

That could include facilitating companies to conduct research in areas that will help their bottom line, either through nonproprietary research, in which the results of the experiments are expected to be published, or through proprietary research, in which the results of the studies can remain privately held. In the latter case, the companies provide full cost recovery for use of the facilities, capabilities and expertise that the center would incur.

“If you’re a company that is a manufacturer of a type of material that might have a nanostructure, feel free to contact me,” he offered.

Since he arrived, Dickerson said he has worked with companies interested in proprietary and nonproprietary research, including electronic and biomedical materials device companies.

The physical, chemical and mechanical properties of nanomaterials tend to be different from the same properties for larger materials, even when the atoms of both are identical. Scientists explore ways to exploit those properties for new devices, processes, and materials.

Dickerson said he expects some of the products companies are developing with the CFN may become commercially available (either individually or as a part of something else) within the next 10 years.

In his own research, Dickerson has examined the relationships between the structure, size and optical properties of rare earth oxides, such as europium sesquioxide. Many cathode ray tube TV screens used europium-based compounds to produce red color. His work looks toward applications, such as in highly efficient display devices and X-ray intensifying screens.

“I’m really interested in understanding fundamentally how the structure, composition, and the physical properties of nanomaterials correlate with each other. Particularly, I’m interested in trying to understand how the structure of a material, down to very small nanoscale, relates to how magnetism evolves as you shrink materials further and further down, approaching a single molecule of europium and sulfur.”

A past chairman of the Committee on Minorities in Physics of the American Physical Society, Dickerson was a recipient of an APS scholarship in 1989 and 1990.

His participation on the committee was a chance to “help those students in kindergarten through 12th grade, as well as students in undergraduate programs, at junior colleges and graduate students in their progression to the next stage in their academic lives and careers,” he said.

The number of minorities in physics has grown over the last 25 years, he said, but it’s still not “exactly reflective of the demographics of minorities in greater society. That’s something we’re endeavoring to improve.”

He said the imbalance needs to be addressed not just for the sake of having a balance in the numbers, but to solve the nation’s need for more technology and science development.

A resident of Brooklyn, Dickerson is married to Courtney Martin, an art historian and professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

Dickerson encourages anyone with an interest in BNL’s facilities, to meet their commercial or research goals, to reach out to him.

Enormous and powerful though they were, dinosaurs didn’t appear on the Earth and muscle out other animals — mostly reptiles. Somehow, many of those reptiles, who were eating, sleeping and reproducing for about 50 million years during the Triassic period, died during a major extinction event, making it possible for dinosaurs to dominate during the Jurassic period.

What, scientists have wondered, caused such a major shift from one set of creatures to another?

In a new paper in the prestigious journal Science, researchers from Stony Brook University, Columbia, MIT, Rutgers and Université Mohammet Premier in Oujda, Morocco believe they may have the answer.

These scientists, including Associate Professor Troy Rasbury from SBU, looked at rocks in Newark, N.J., and Hartford, Conn., that were a part of an area called the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, which is likely the largest of the Large Igneous Provinces. These rocks suggest that a large outpouring of gases and aerosols may have been responsible for the extinction.

The lava and gases were released in four pulses over 600,000 years, which is a relatively short time frame for such violent environmental changes.

Scientists had known about the extinction and the lava flows, but they hadn’t been able to pinpoint the time frame over which the Earth may have been less habitable. During the Triassic period, the Earth was just starting to break apart from a period when it was the supercontinent called Pangaea.

The researchers used a process called uranium-lead dating using zircon. Zircon crystals that are millions of years old are extremely resistant to lead. They do, however, include uranium. The only way lead, however, can become embedded in the crystals is if it starts out as an isotope of uranium and decays slowly into lead.

This dating technique, coupled with others that examine the periodic effect of other celestial bodies like the planets in our milky way, has greatly enhanced the ability to narrow down the time span during which these major events occurred.

“There’s definitely rocks contemporaneous with extinction,” said Rasbury. “We can imagine that there’s a lot of gases that come with that, as they’re being erupted. There’s an out-gassing and an environmental deterioration. That’s the link.”

Rasbury praised the work of her colleagues, who have done “a tremendous job” by analyzing samples that were collected from the surface.

“That’s what makes this such a special study. The ages are demonstrating that it’s plausible,” she said. The coincident timing of the presence of these gases and the animal turnover suggests there may be a causal link between the mass extinction and the relatively sudden environmental change.

Rasbury’s main role in this study is to bring the team together. She put together the National Science Foundation proposal that provided some of the funding for this research.

Rasbury and her colleagues at Stony Brook will soon be able to do some of the same research on other rock samples. The university received funding for a mass spectrometer. The lab had a grand reopening on April 19.

“The equipment is here and there’s a lot of hard work in front of us to make sure we can do the high-precision analysis,” she said. “It requires an enormous amount of attention to details.”

Born in North Carolina but raised in Texas, Rasbury speaks at a rapid pace.

“I had a professor at the University of New Orleans who said he didn’t know it was possible to have a Texas accent and talk that fast,” she laughed.

Her identical twin Sidney Rasbury Hemming, who was born 27 minutes before Troy, is also a geologist and attends some of the same professional gatherings.

“I was at a meeting and everybody was calling me Sidney because we talk and laugh the same,” she said.

Rasbury is married to Department of Geosciences Professor William Holt. The couple, who live in East Setauket, have two daughters. Rebecca, 12, is in sixth grade at Setauket School while Virginia, who will be 9 next month, is in third grade.

The house is filled with rocks, although Rasbury said her daughters bring many of them in from the beaches. Her daughters also love to go to gem and mineral shows.

She and her husband talk about geology at home “as long as our kids will let us.”

Like other parts of the body, the brain produces waste that needs to be cleared away. Through the so-called glymphatic system, the brain uses a type of water channel to remove tau proteins and other products.

When the glymphatic system isn’t functioning properly, these proteins do not clear correctly from the brain. From this research, scientists believe a breakdown may lead to or exacerbate problems related to the development of Alzheimer’s or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a progressive degenerative disease that is often caused by multiple concussions.

“Normally, we produce proteins and peptides that are getting excreted,” explained Helene Benveniste, a professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Radiology at Stony Brook University’s School of Medicine. It’s not under a lot of pressure, so it’s a slower process, but it’s like taking a water hose to a dirty street, she said. “If this system doesn’t work, compounds may build up and could lead to diseases.”

While scientists and medical researchers knew a defect in the clearing system could lead to neurological problems, they weren’t sure how to track the clearing process in real time.

That’s where Benveniste — who works one day a week in the operating room as a clinical anesthesiologist and the rest of the time in research — entered the picture. Using magnetic resonance imaging, she was able to use two different contrast agents to map this pathway, where she also found important clearance pathways for brain waste. The studies were done on an animal model.

The contrast approach is “a common way of detecting leaks,” she explained.

By using this same technique, she and her team were able to follow the glymphatic process, which often operated in parallel to major arteries.

Using these imaging techniques, doctors may be able to monitor the human brain to determine disease susceptibility. Through several MRI views over time, doctors might be able to detect signs of problems with the glymphatic system before a patient shows any symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

She hopes one day that doctors will track individuals who “may be susceptible” to Alzheimer’s.

“Anything we can do now to understand how a pathological process is building or is imminently developing in a human with the end result of Alzheimer’s is incredibly valuable,” said Benveniste.

While there is no cure for Alzheimer’s, tracking it before an intellectual slide into a potentially irreversible course of the disease may provide some effective preclinical intervention.

If doctors could slow down Alzheimer’s by 20 to 30 percent, they might not prevent people from getting the disease, but they might extend the time period during which individuals can live independent lives, she suggested.

“The impact on health costs and society is tremendous,” Benveniste said. “Do I think this is just a diagnostic tool or could it teach us something about how we might treat Alzheimer’s? The answer is yes, this might be important for that purpose.”

The challenge, and it’s significant, is to understand how the glympathic system works in the human brain, so that doctors can manipulate it.

There are also studies that show that some people have tau and amyloid in their brains who don’t show signs of Alzheimer’s. However, she said, there are pathological diagnostic criteria which can quantify the impact of the proteins present and often, the severity of the pathology correlates with the cognitive decline.

If, as Benveniste believes, these channels become critically important early signs of a susceptibility to disease or a preclinical state for the disease, researchers would also need to develop more therapies.

She doesn’t have any direct family experience with Alzheimer’s. She feels blessed that her 93-year-old mother is still sharp mentally.

A native of Copenhagen, Benveniste came to the United States in 1989, where she worked at Duke for 11 years. She came to Stony Brook in 2000.

She travels regularly back to Denmark. Those trips may prove especially valuable because Stony Brook is obtaining a PET/MRI machine, which is expected to be installed in the summer. In Copenhagen, they have had this same system up and running for over a year and she plans to travel in the next few months to Copenhagen to see how they are running their machine.

She and her husband, Peter Huttemeier, a retired anesthesiologist, met in Copenhagen. They live in Northport, where being so close to the water reminds them of Denmark.

As for her work, Benveniste hopes that the ability to track the glymphatic system leads to considerably more research from her colleagues in and out of Stony Brook.